I don’t claim to be an ‘A’ student.
-Sam Cooke
For those who grew up in other faith traditions or without one, it is difficult to imagine the intensity of a good old-fashioned gospel sermon. I remember sitting in my grandfather’s church as a child as he paced back and forth on the stage, preaching in his typical fire and brimstone manner. He kept a handkerchief handy to wipe the sweat that beaded on his forehead, and his shirt was drenched by the end of the service. There’s a very distinct vocal pattern to the kind of preaching I’m talking about, with frequent mid-sentence crescendos that trail off from a shout. And if you happen to be sitting at the right angle, you can see the spit flying with each word.
Some words produce more spit than others. Sometimes this is simply due to phonics, but often it’s because of pure disdain. Some of the words that are frequently spat are “scientists,” “professors,” “public schools,” and “evolution.” Growing up, there was a constant tension between the budding scientist in me that was reading books about astrophysics and my Christian school science classes that told me that the universe was no more than 6,000 years old and that the Grand Canyon was a result of the worldwide flood in Genesis. Dinosaurs, I was taught, coexisted with humans until the worldwide flood, which turned most of them into fossils and changed the climate in a way that made the planet inhospitable to the few that made it onto the ark, resulting in their eventual and regrettable demise.
I’ll come back to how they arrived at these beliefs and others, but first it’s important to understand why. I cannot overemphasize the importance of the doctrine of biblical literalism to evangelicals’ ability to weaponize scripture. It is this doctrine that allows them to cherry-pick Bible verses, or even parts of Bible verses, to condemn homosexuality, to keep women out of leadership positions, to justify capital punishment, and to frame abortion as murder. It’s this doctrine that was used to justify chattel slavery. And it was this doctrine that resulted in me leaving the church.
My faith was strong, but it was also brittle, based as it was on a literal interpretation of the Bible. When it finally snapped, it was gone for good. I allowed a little grace for the myths about creation and the flood, but it soon became clear that I couldn’t reconcile the Bible with the universe, or even with itself. And because my faith was built on the foundation of “the inspired, infallible, inerrant word of God,” the whole thing crumbled when I admitted to myself that I didn’t believe even parts of it.
It didn’t have to be that way. They could have preached a Christianity that didn’t fall apart the minute someone enrolled in a biology class or simply took the time to read the book with an open mind. If I hadn’t been taught to believe that every sentence in the Bible was literally true, I could have easily forgiven the miscategorization of bats as birds in Leviticus 11 as perfectly understandable, given the time period during which it was written. But because I had, I was forced to reckon with the questionable taxonomic credentials of the creator.
So why do they bother? Why, instead of admitting that Genesis 6-8 is a flood myth similar to numerous other contemporaneous flood myths, did Ken Ham double down and spend $150 million to employ heavy machinery and an army of 1,000 people to build a landlocked ark in Kentucky? Because Biblical literalism, or more accurately the pretense of Biblical literalism, is the foundation that upholds the existing power structure.
To be clear, nobody actually believes that the Bible is 100% literally true. Nobody thinks that the breasts of the woman in Song of Songs actually looked like gazelles.1 Nobody believes that Paul gave new believers in Corinth actual milk because they weren’t ready for solid food2 or that “being unequally yoked with unbelievers,” referred to finding a partner to pull a plow.3 I’ve seen a lot of Christian women praying without head coverings. And judging by the ratio of books about lust to evangelical eyeballs, I’m fairly confident that they sometimes decide not to take even the crimson red words of Jesus Christ at face value.
In some instances, they do the opposite of taking it literally, like when they argue that Song of Songs isn’t actually about two lovers, but rather a metaphor for Christ’s relationship with the church. Or at graduations, when everybody’s mom writes Jeremiah 29:11 in their cards, ignoring the fact that God was talking specifically to the prophet Jeremiah about the plans he had for the nation of Israel, not speaking directly to some 18-year-old white kid from Georgia.
Literal interpretations of carefully selected verses are used to keep women out of leadership positions, to deny the existence of non-gender conforming people, to label homosexuality a sin, and to enforce their idea of what marriage should look like. Strict lifelong monogamy, for instance, is supported by Proverbs 5: “May you rejoice with the wife of your youth…may her breasts satisfy you always, may you ever be intoxicated with her love.” Ignoring the glaring irony that this passage was purportedly written by a man with 700 wives and 300 concubines, evangelicals present it as clear evidence of “the Biblical model for marriage.” If you read this passage in context, it’s clearly about adultery specifically–defined as having sex with another man’s wife, which was viewed as a property crime against the man that owned her. It says nothing about the number of wives with whose breasts one might hope to find satisfaction.
The same thing could be done in reverse, of course. “There is neither…male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” would go a long way towards promoting affirmation of non-gender conforming people and elevating the status of women, for instance (Galatians 3:28). But that’s not the goal. Rather than being based on the teachings of Christ, white evangelical theology focuses on carefully selected passages, often taken out of context and interpreted disingenuously, that are used to subjugate people and prop up the existing power structure.
Biblical literalism isn’t a novel concept, and it’s not unique to evangelicals; there have been theologians that have held this belief for centuries. But things got a lot harder in 1859, when Charles Darwin published On the Origin of the Species. Prior to this, and his 1871 book The Descent of Man, a Christian that rejected the story of creation in Genesis would have had no alternative explanation for how things came to be how they are.
There were certainly other potential explanations; every culture around the world and throughout history has had some sort of story about the origins of the universe, or at least the parts of it that they knew existed. But there was little chance that Christians would turn to the Cherokee story that the land around them was formed from a bit of mud gathered from the bottom of the ocean by a water beetle, or the Norse myth that the earth was created from the fallen body of Ymir. For pre-Darwinian Christians, rejecting the biblical creation story would have left them without any explanation at all.
To be sure, Darwin didn’t answer all the questions. He had no explanation for how the Earth was formed, or how life originally came to be. But it was an important step towards developing explanations of the universe that were based on something other than myths that had been handed down over generations.
On the Origin of the Species was met with mixed reviews. Charles Kingsley, Darwin’s friend and a priest in the Church of England, wrote a letter to Darwin stating, “All I have seen of it awes me,” and admitting with intellectual humility, “If you be right, I must give up much that I have believed & written.” Kingsley mused that he had “gradually learnt to see that it is just as noble a conception of Deity, to believe that He created primal forms capable of self development” as to believe that said deity created everything exactly as it currently exists. He even pondered “whether the former be not the loftier thought.”
But not everyone was as impressed as Kingsley. The publication of On the Origin of the Species sparked intense debate internationally in the scientific and religious communities. Many religious leaders viewed it as an attempt to write God out of the story by constructing “another elaborate theory to exclude Deity from renewed acts of creation” and asking, “Why not accept direct interference, rather than evolutions of law, and needlessly indirect or remote action?”
There were heated debates from which Darwin was forced to sit out due to his poor health, being represented instead by his friend Thomas Huxley, whose support for Darwin was so intense that he earned the nickname “Darwin’s Bulldog.” But the debate didn’t stop with Huxley. Fundamentalist Christians, desperately clinging to a literal interpretation of the Bible, were unwilling to accept a figurative reading of the creation account, or to allow that the “days” in Genesis 1 weren’t actually 24-hour periods. Eventually, some of them went so far as to outlaw the teaching of evolution.
In 1925, the Tennessee legislature nearly unanimously passed a bill criminalizing the teaching of evolution in public schools, despite the fact that the representative that sponsored the bill admittedly “didn't know anything about evolution.” He’d just “read in the papers that boys and girls were coming home from school and telling their fathers and mothers that the Bible was all nonsense.”
Shortly after the bill was passed, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) announced that they would cover the legal defense of any teacher charged under the new law. A group of citizens from the town of Dayton, Tennessee saw this as an excellent opportunity to draw tourists to the town and get some much-needed publicity. They approached high school science teacher John Scopes to ask if he would be willing to admit to having taught evolution in his public school as a springboard for a lawsuit to challenge the law. He agreed, although he primarily taught physics and math, and couldn’t remember clearly whether evolution by natural selection had ever been a topic he’d covered, and coached several of his students about how to respond to questions when they were called as witnesses.
With well-known politician, anti-evolution activist, and skilled orator William Jennings Bryan among the attorneys for the prosecution, Scopes assembled a legal team that included Clarence Darrow, another expert orator and long-time rival of Bryan.
The plan to bring a crowd to Dayton worked. The streets of Dayton were transformed into a circus-like atmosphere with concessions, carnival games, and caged monkeys. The eight-day trial received international media attention and was the first trial in the United States to be broadcast on the radio. At one point, the judge had to order that the trial be moved to the courthouse lawn because of the crowd size.
The defense had planned to call eight expert witnesses from the scientific community to testify in an attempt to reconcile the theory of evolution with the Biblical account–a task which can be done, but only at the expense of interpreting Genesis 1 and 2 a bit more loosely. However, the judge allowed only one of them to take the stand. Without other witnesses to call, the defense made the unorthodox move of asking Bryan to go on the stand, where he was questioned by Darrow about his own literal interpretation of the Bible. Darrow questioned Bryan about whether Eve was truly created from Adam’s rib, where their son Cain found a wife, and other topics in an attempt to point out that it was unreasonable to believe the biblical account to be literal or to use it as a science textbook.
In the end, the jury deliberated only 9 minutes before reluctantly returning this guilty verdict:
We claim that the defendant is not guilty, but as the court has excluded any testimony, except as to the one issue as to whether he taught that man descended from a lower order of animals, and we cannot contradict that testimony, there is no logical thing to come except that the jury find a verdict that we may carry to the higher court, purely as a matter of proper procedure. We do not think it is fair to the court or counsel on the other side to waste a lot of time when we know this is the inevitable result and probably the best result for the case.
The judge didn’t make any ruling as to the constitutionality of the law, so it remained in effect. Scopes was fined $100, and Bryan…well, he died in his sleep five days later and nobody’s really sure what happened there.
Many other states would go on to pass similar legislation banning the teaching of evolution in public schools. In 1968, the Supreme Court issued a ruling in Epperson v. Arkansas, ruling an Arkansas ban against teaching evolution in public schools unconstitutional because it violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment by privileging a particular religion. But the evangelical activists are still at it, having replaced the word “creationism” with “intelligent design,” which is essentially creationism by an unnamed creator (wink) to get around the religion issue.
Despite the overwhelming evidence for evolution from multiple scientific disciplines, they still refuse to believe it. They insist that the 6-day creation story in which God spoke light into existence before the sun and other stars is historically accurate, fighting to have it placed into science curricula—if not instead of evolution, at least alongside it so they can “teach the controversy.” The teaching of evolution in public schools has improved in recent years, but recent surveys show that only 67% of high school science teachers report presenting evolution as the scientific consensus without hedging at least a bit.
Of course, many evangelicals solve this problem by putting their children in Christian schools or homeschooling them. That’s what happened with me. I attended public schools until fourth grade before moving to Bob Jones Elementary School. For my peers that were unfortunate enough to attend public schools, our pastor told them from the pulpit to learn the “correct” answers for the test, but to know in their hearts that evolution was a lie.
Until I began attending my Christian school at 10 years of age, I hadn’t given the origin of things much thought. I had heard the creation story and believed it, but it just wasn’t a major topic for me. I knew enough to know that when I was watching The Land Before Time and heard that dinosaurs existed millions of years ago, the screenwriters had their facts wrong. But from the very beginning of my Christian education, my teachers were relentless in promoting young-earth creationism. The “evolutionists” (a term as absurd as “gravitionists”) were sent by Satan to deceive us. Scientists thought they were smarter than God. Or they were trying to prove that he didn’t exist so they could continue living in sin. But we had all the answers, right there in the pages of the Bible.
The story went like this: There was a vast expanse of nothingness, described as being “formless and empty” with “darkness over the surface of the deep.” God spoke everything into existence ex nihilo (“out of nothing”) in the following order:
Day 1: light and darkness, day and night
Day 2: sky
Day 3: dry ground and oceans, plants
Day 4: sun, moon, and stars
Day 5: aquatic life and birds
Day 6: animals and humans
On the seventh day, he rested. But I need to circle back to day 2. The sky is described as empty space between the bodies of water above and below it. The water below it would soon be gathered together to form oceans. But the water above it was called the firmament, which was a rotating dome-shaped structure made from water to which the sun, moon, and stars were affixed. This will come back into play in a bit.
Somehow I never noticed that the account of the creation of humans in Genesis 1 is different from the account in Genesis 2; they just got merged together into a single narrative. In Genesis 1, God announces “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness,” and then proceeds to create humans, “male and female.” (That “us” also slipped by me.)
In Genesis 2, we find an entirely different story. The earth exists, but there are no plants on it, because “the Lord God had not sent rain on the earth and there was no one to work the ground.” In fact, it would not rain for hundreds of years until the flood in Genesis 6, which we’ll get to soon. Instead, there were “streams” that “came up from the earth and watered the whole surface of the ground.”
But there still wasn’t anyone to work the ground, so God “formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.” God places the man (here I picture a tiny little Adam pinched between God’s thumb and forefinger) in the garden that he had just planted and tasks him with tending it.
God realizes that it’s not good for Adam to be alone, so he parades all the animals he had “formed out of the ground” in front of Adam, who is responsible for naming them all. Shockingly, none of them seems like a suitable partner, so God causes Adam to fall asleep, removes one of his ribs, and uses it to make a woman—the unnamed one I wrote about in chapter one. (I was learning to read chest x-rays in medical school when I realized that men don’t have fewer ribs than women, as I had apparently been told somewhere along the way.)
And all this happened approximately 6,000 years ago. That’s an estimate that was derived by cobbling together various genealogies. And it’s an estimate that disagrees with science by several orders of magnitude. This is a problem. When I began studying young-earth creationism in my science class, I started to really think about it for the first time. I was interested in astronomy and knew that we can see stars that are more than 10,000 light-years away with the naked eye, and unimaginably farther with telescopes. And I knew that if a star is 10,000 light-years away from earth, we’re seeing the light that star made 10,000 years ago, long before I was told stars were created. My science teacher taught me to reconcile that by helping me to understand “creation with apparent age,” the idea that God created oak trees, not acorns or sprouts, and that he had apparently given starlight quite a head start as well. And yes, Adam would have had a belly button.
Another really big problem was dinosaurs. People have been stumbling across dinosaur fossils since there have been people, but we didn’t know what they were until relatively recently. They may have been identified as dragon bones, or perhaps the bones of a giant human. But in the mid-19th century, around the same time that Darwin was making waves, the study of dinosaurs picked up steam. While scientists were trying to figure out how to date these fossils, biblical literalists were looking for a way to reconcile this new discovery. Some decided that God had put the fossils there to test our faith in him. Others insisted that paleontologists were just piecing together bones willy-nilly and assembling fictional creatures from the remains of modern animals. And others believed that Satan had placed them there to deceive us and lead us away from God.
By the time I started studying creationism, they had come up with a different answer. Dinosaurs were “creatures that move across the ground,” and therefore created on the sixth day, right alongside humans, with whom they co-existed until the worldwide flood recorded in Genesis 6. You’ve probably seen cute depictions of Noah’s ark with adorable pairs of different kinds of animals. But this story is anything but cute. God had decided that he regretted making humans because they were so damn evil. Initially he limits their lifespan to 120 years. (They’d been living well into their 900s prior to this, perhaps due to the protection from radiation provided by the firmament, I was told.) But then he changes course and elects to just kill them all, along with all the animals, and start over.
He decides to preserve the one decent man, Noah, along with his three sons and however many wives they had. God warns Noah, who was 600 years old, of the pending flood and gives him instructions to build a boat. Once it’s complete, Noah is to put a pair of each kind of animal, along with “every kind of food that is to be eaten.” (Everything was vegetarian until this point. Dinosaurs and other animals that had sharp teeth and claws were designed by God to eat fruit with thick rinds or something.)
The immutable God then changes his mind and instructs Noah to increase to seven pairs of every kind of bird and every kind of “clean” animal, with the term “clean” referring to animals that he would spell out to Moses many generations later as acceptable for sacrifice and human consumption. All the pairs of animals made their way to the ark, and it started to rain. For the first time ever.
That’s a lot of animals. Far more than would fit on a boat with the dimensions God prescribed. Creationists get around this by leaning hard on the word “kind,” which they distinguish from “species.” An example of a kind would be cats. Noah didn’t take pairs of tigers, pumas, lions, ocelots, etc. Rather, he just needed one pair of cats, from which—shockingly—they believe the diversity of cats we see today descended. They allow this “micro-evolution,” while standing firmly against “macro-evolution,” which would involve the transition from one kind to another. And it apparently happened staggeringly quickly.
And yes, there were dinosaurs on the ark. A pair of each kind. Babies, obviously, so they’d fit. If you have trouble imagining how they imagine this would work, search YouTube for a video of Ken Ham’s Ark Encounter. It’s a full-scale replica of what he thinks Noah’s Ark would have looked like, with three decks of exhibits showing how Noah and his family might have lived on the ark with all the animals (dinosaurs included), and how they might have engineered systems to help them provide food, water, and waste disposal for all the animals. Kids 10 and under get in free, of course, because it’s important to get them before they learn to think critically.
It rains for 40 days, dumping all the water that had been stored in the firmament, until the water covers “all the high mountains under the entire heavens.” The flood lasts 150 days, and then God “sent a wind over the earth and the waters receded.” (To where isn’t clear.) But eventually the ark lands on dry ground, and Noah and his family let out all the animals to “be fruitful and multiply.” There was never any discussion of whether the kangaroos surfed to Australia, or how long it took the pair of sloths to make their way to South America.
This worldwide flood, creationists say, is where fossils came from. You see, it rained so hard that the sediment buried the animals quickly and preserved their remains. The existence of different types of fossils in different rock strata is explained by saying that the smarter animals realized what was happening and attempted to escape to higher ground and were thus not buried as deeply. Also, the flood explains the formation of the Grand Canyon, in a matter of days or weeks.
When I was in school, the explanation for the extinction of the dinosaurs that had made it onto the ark was that after the firmament was gone, they just weren’t well-suited to the climate anymore, and they died. A 2020 version of the same 5th grade science textbook, published by their in-house publishing company, suggests that they may have become extinct due to over-predation. By humans. Or that there may still be some out there and we just haven’t seen them yet. (This latter hypothesis is certainly not referring to the fact that modern science has revealed that birds are dinosaurs.)
Throughout this textbook, students are told what “evolutionists” think, and then immediately presented with an answer consistent with a literal reading of the Bible and reminded that “God’s Word is always accurate. We can trust it to be true even in areas of science.” They reject all methods of dating fossils that would date them more than 6,000 years old, stating, “The date a scientist gives to a fossil depends on his worldview. Many dating methods assume that evolution is true and that life on earth began millions of years ago. Because these ages do not agree with the biblical account of God’s Creation, we know evolution cannot be true.”
The textbook goes on to argue that the mythical beast Behemoth mentioned in Job 40 was probably a sauropod, and the Leviathan in Job 41 sounds like it could have been a plesiosaur. Chinese and European legends about dragons also “might have been dinosaurs,” children are told.
In this science curriculum, which is widely used among Christian schools and by homeschooling families, students are taught from an early age to distrust science. “In order to properly understand what you see,” they are told, “you have to start with the Bible.” Critical thinking is shut down instead of fostered, and children learn to start with a conclusion and look for evidence to support it rather than looking at the evidence and seeing where it leads them.
While this science curriculum may be laughable, it isn’t funny. It has disastrous consequences. It conditions people not to trust themselves and their senses. In my 5th grade class, we would recite Proverbs 3:5-6 together every day: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight.” This verse and others like it are used to teach children not to trust their intellect, not to think for themselves. Asking questions is encouraged, so long one doesn’t go too far and start landing on the “wrong” answers. Once that happens, they are immediately reigned back in with another out-of-context verse. Those who begin to see that scientists are making sense may be told, “It is better to take refuge in the Lord than to trust in humans.”4 There’s a constant tension between outside information from “the world” and the unquestionable “truth” of the Bible, or rather the specific way evangelicals are taught to read the Bible.
I remember many times as a child when I would try to come up with a scientific explanation for miraculous things in the Bible. I was willing to allow that God could do anything he wanted, but it was the how that I needed. So the magi followed a bright new star to Bethlehem to find the baby Jesus. Sounded like a supernova. I had no problem accepting that God could arrange for a supernova at just the right time and in just the right place to welcome Jesus into the world. Until I thought about it more and realized that, in the Northern Hemisphere, all the stars appear to rotate around Polaris, which occupies the only position in which a star can appear stationary. Meaning that the only way they could have followed the star to Bethlehem was from due south. But that doesn’t explain how they knew where to stop. And they said they saw it rise in the east. A well-timed and perfectly-positioned comet, perhaps?
I had a lot of other questions that I tried to reconcile, willing to allow that God could work miracles, but failing to understand how he could violate fundamental laws of physics or chemistry to do so. Because the answers I got from my teachers at school or the Sunday School teachers at my church were typically, “With God, all things are possible,” or “I guess you can ask him when you get to heaven,” I soon learned to stop asking questions. The inquisitive brain of an intelligent and scientifically-minded child was shut down. And I think I would have chosen a different career path if it hadn’t been—if my curiosity would have been fostered rather than crushed, and my critical thinking would have been encouraged.
I did my undergraduate studies at the United States Naval Academy, where I majored in English but took a wide variety of technical courses as part of the core curriculum. I took two semesters of chemistry, physics, and electrical engineering; three of calculus; and one each of differential equations, statistics, thermodynamics, and naval architecture. None of this conflicted with my biblical literalist worldview. It wasn’t until I was taking a biology class at a local community college as a prerequisite for medical school that I was exposed to the theory of evolution by natural selection in a serious way.
A lot of things fell into place. It all made so much sense. But it was still difficult to shed the indoctrination. Once I started medical school, it was assumed (appropriately) that everyone in the lecture hall understood evolution and believed it to have happened. As I was exposed to the intricacies of how the human body worked down to the cellular level, I was fascinated by the complexity of how various systems are regulated. By this time, I had allowed myself to go so far as to believe that God created the world in some form or another, and then guided evolution over time—maybe not billions of years, but certainly more than 6,000. But I really struggled to apply this to humans.
We were made in the image of God, I had been told. And we had souls. If humans had evolved from earlier lifeforms, at what point did hominids acquire souls? Will there be Neanderthals in heaven? Did Homo erectus have souls? When, exactly, if human evolution occurred, did our ancestors make the transition from apes to apes with souls, created in the image of God?
I struggled with these questions for the next several years. While I was doing my pediatric residency, I began writing a blog about pediatrics. One of my posts went viral and ended up getting published in the Washington Post, which was entirely unexpected. It was during this time that I joined Twitter to promote my writing and found myself drawn to the skeptic community.
These were scientists, healthcare workers, and other people who looked at the world from a rational point of view. They worked to debunk pseudoscience in areas like homeopathy, the anti-vaccine movement, and various forms of unproven or potentially dangerous alternative medicine. This was my crowd, and I had no idea that it existed. The skeptic community isn’t without its faults, but I had finally found a group of like-minded people where critical thinking was valued.
It was in this online community, in my late-20s, that I finally saw the harm of the science denial made necessary by a literal approach to the Bible. I realized that climate change was a very real existential threat, not the hoax I’d been told it was. Growing up, people would joke about “global warming” on an unseasonably cold day in April, unable to distinguish weather from climate. But science was not to be trusted, and we didn’t really need to worry about it because God was in control and certainly wouldn’t allow our planet to become inhospitable before Jesus returned, which was going to happen very soon.
This science denial carries over into other areas of life as well. I’ve seen videos of pastors and congregants standing on a beach, sincerely attempting to “pray the hurricane away” rather than evacuating to safety. Many people that choose not to vaccinate their children do so because of an ingrained distrust of science, or a misunderstanding of how the scientific process works. They often view the human body as inherently perfect, as it was made in the image of God, and hold to the view that God is in control and will protect them until it’s his plan for them to die. This causes many to refuse effective medical treatments for cancer or other serious illnesses, turning instead to dietary changes and prayer, or some other combination of interventions.
Perhaps more than anything in modern history, the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the extent of damage that is caused by this science denial. Evangelical Christians would frequently violate stay-at-home mandates, citing their religious freedom to gather to worship while placing the lives of others at risk. Many viewed masking and vaccines skeptically, or opposed them vocally, sometimes violently. Some claimed that the pandemic was a hoax, or that it was intentionally caused by scientists. Some refused to be vaccinated, stating that they didn’t need it because they were protected by the blood of Christ. Maps of low vaccination rates correspond almost perfectly with areas where white evangelical Christianity is the predominant religion.
Believing that God is in complete control of one’s life, and that scientists aren’t to be trusted, white evangelicals, to a greater degree than any other group, failed to take the relatively simple measures that we knew to be effective at limiting the spread of this virus. Pastors refused to comply with orders prohibiting mass gatherings, even if they were arrested for doing so. Christian musician Sean Feucht hosted large worship concerts during the height of the pandemic to protest restrictions. There’s no way to estimate the lives that were lost because of these decisions and all their downstream effects. But it’s certain that the lack of confidence in science mandated by a literal interpretation of the Bible, and reinforced over one’s lifetime, had lethal effects.
By shutting down the questions of curious children and telling them that all the answers they need come from the Bible, evangelicals limit these children’s potential or redirect their lives. Children who have grown up in Christian schools or in Christian homeschooling families are often unprepared to understand or believe the science that they will eventually learn in college. They’re less likely to choose careers in the sciences, and to make the contributions to society that they might otherwise have made. This is a disservice not only to those children, but to our society as a whole.
All of this is entirely unnecessary. Many Christians are able to reconcile science with their faith, and there are many scientists that are also devout Christians. It’s this one particular expression of Christianity that clings so tightly to a literal interpretation of the Bible that forces its adherents to deny well-established and widely-held scientific facts for which there is nearly universal consensus in favor of myths from a book written thousands of years ago. Like the fruit in the Garden of Eden, knowledge about science is a threat to the power structure. And with advancements in technology, the truth is getting harder to conceal. Bob Jones University doesn’t filter their internet, prohibit the use of mobile hotspots, and reserve the right to inspect smartphones for “objectionable content” only because they’re scared of porn. They’re also terrified of Google searches like “evidence for evolution” or “how old is the earth.” And the reason that the creation and flood myths have to be taken literally is so literal interpretations of other selected portions of scripture can be used to perpetuate the patriarchal, white supremacist, Christian nationalist, anti-LGBTQIA+ power structure.
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Song of Songs 7:3
1 Corinthians 3:2
2 Corinthians 6:14
Psalm 118:8